


Other Selves

by redcandle17



Category: American Gods - Neil Gaiman
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 11:34:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1093423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redcandle17/pseuds/redcandle17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Krishna, Allah, and Jesus wait at a bus stop in New York and commiserate over their other selves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Other Selves

**Author's Note:**

  * For [woggy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/woggy/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide season, Woggy. I'd recently re-read American Gods when I saw your request and then this happened. I hope this was the kind of fic you wanted.

There are other versions of him in this city, but it used to be that they each kept to their own neighborhoods. Immigrants continuously stream in from every part of the world, and as the previous waves become successful, they move away to Florida, to Pennsylvania, to California. Visa allotments change, and the human tide ebbs and flows. Neighborhoods are more porous these days. 

Krishna is coming out of his favorite roti shop on Liberty Avenue when he sees another of his selves. He came here in the '80s with the Trinidadians and the Guyanese. This is his place. But times change, and so do places and people and, eventually, gods. 

There are more and more people from India moving into this neighborhood, and they've brought their Krishna with them. The little differences between the two gods are nothing and everything. They don't make eye contact, embarrassed by each other.

Afterwards, Krishna sits at a bus stop with Allah and feeds the pigeons and complains. 

Allah understands. He's had run-ins with fiercer, sterner versions of himself freshly arrived from the old world. It's even worse for him, he confesses. He's been losing followers. The people who brought him here from the West Indies are abandoning him for these other versions of him. Not all of them, but enough to make a difference. 

A Q10 pulls up, nearly empty at this time of the day. Jesus disembarks. He sits on the bench beside them to wait for a transfer. He's a good guy, their Jesus, not like some versions of his father Krishna's met. He's sympathetic when Krishna tells him about this new other Krishna, even though he has it worse. There are dozens of versions of him in Queens alone. 

"I miss home," Krishna says. But it's hard to say what home. He changed so much when his followers took him with them to work on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, and again when their descendants brought him to New York.

Another bus pulls up. Jesus invites them to his birthday party, but they both politely refuse. At Krishna's home before this home, some of his followers decorated his temples for Jesus's birthday. But this is a different place and a different time. Jesus boards the bus alone, and a few minutes later, Allah walks to the corner store. Krishna continues throwing stale cereal on the sidewalk. 

He used to get fresh fruit daily, but the economy's in the toilet and his followers aren't rich. They weren't rich in the old-but-not-older country either. The poor there had cows and fruit trees and not much else. The poor here have smartphones and three jobs per person. 

He's not a melancholy god, though. He doesn't brood for long. He knows he's luckier than most. He still has worshippers. He saw Isis the other day, cold and starved, barely kept alive by a group of college neo-pagans. His problem is a privileged problem to have. He pops a handful of cheerios in his mouth and tries not to think of the days when they bathed his idols in fresh milk and he was the only Krishna in town.


End file.
